Guilty Minds

68

I had three voice mails on my phone: from Mandy, from Dorothy, and from Balakian, the hipster cop I’d started to think of as Kombucha. I’d already talked to Mandy, and I knew that if there was anything urgent, Dorothy would have texted me. So as I pulled the silver Chrysler into traffic on Rhode Island Avenue, I called Kombucha back.

“There you are. Heller, we need to talk.”

“I’m kind of busy. What’s this about?”

A pause. “We may have a suspect.”

“Who is it?”

“We need to talk,” he repeated.

“Give me an hour.”

“Sooner if you can, please.”

“Okay. Homicide branch in Southwest?”

“Uh, no. Let’s not meet at headquarters.”

“Okay.” Strange, I thought. “Who’s the suspect?”

“We can talk about that when we get together,” he said. “The sooner the better.”

Kombucha was maddeningly cryptic. It occurred to me, fleetingly, that the suspect he had in mind was me. But he wouldn’t handle it this way, with a polite request to come in. He’d have shown up at my hotel with a squad of officers.

Then what questions could he possibly have? And why did he not want to meet at police headquarters?

Back at the hotel suite, I arrived to find Dorothy beavering away on her laptop. She was wearing jeans and a blouse in a deep shade of oxblood. Her fingernails were the same color. Her bracelets rattled as her fingers flew across the keyboard.

“Where’s Mandy?” I said.

“I think she’s at her apartment,” she said, not looking up. “She called me looking for you.”

“Shit.” I’d asked her to meet me at the hotel, where I could feel confident she was safe.

“Hey, what happened to you?” she said, staring at me. “My God.”

“I had a disagreement with one of the Centurions. Name of Curtis Schmidt.”

“Can I get you something?”

“I’ll grab some Advil. I’m okay.”

“You wanted me to find Thomas Vogel’s home address.”

“You got it?”

“It’s a hell of a thing. No, I can’t find it.”

“That’s impossible. He’s got to live somewhere.”

“There’s one Thomas Vogel in Virginia, and he’s not the one. Three in Maryland. None of them is an ex-MPD cop.”

“He has to own a house or an apartment. A mortgage, a lease, utilities — you’ve checked all the usual places?”

“Nick, give me a little credit.”

“Sorry.”

“I assume his house is in the name of some corporation. The guy’s a ghost.”

“He’s got to have a PO box somewhere.”

“Probably, but I can’t find it.”

“I have his phone number. On his business card.”

“Then you have more than me.”

I handed her the metal card. She looked at it, then typed some more. After a few seconds, she said, “Nothing.”

I looked for a phone number on my phone, then touched the number and the phone started dialing.

“Garvin.”

“Art, Nick Heller again. I’m looking for Thomas Vogel’s address.”

“The man himself?”

“We’re not turning up anything on the Internet.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. He keeps a very low profile.”

“Why?”

“The story he puts out is that the narcos he busted have friends who want to track him down and give him his own personal retirement package. So he keeps himself unfindable.”

“The department must have a good address for him somewhere.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“Can you look?”

“I’ll look. No promises.”

“Thanks.”

I ended the call, gave Dorothy a glance, shook my head. “That was my retired detective friend, Art Garvin. Doesn’t look good.”

“I’m not giving up.”

I hit the speed dial number on my phone for Mandy Seeger.

“Nick,” she answered. “You back at the hotel?”

“But you’re not here.”

“I had work to do. Where my work stuff is. My little home office.”

“I need you to transport your work stuff over here. Just until we’re done.”

“How do you define done?”

“Until we get an arrest in Kayla’s murder.” I thought, if Kombucha was on the right track, that could be soon. But I didn’t want to tell her yet. Not until I talked to Kombucha.

“I think you and I are working on different things. I want to know who was behind this Claflin hoax that snared me. Who hired the Centurions.”

“We may never know that.”

“Speak for yourself.”

I smiled with admiration. “Listen. I don’t think it’s safe for you to be out there investigating.”

“Safe? Who’s talking about safe? I didn’t go into this line of work to be safe.”

I heaved a long sigh. I thought: soft target. That was the phrase Vogel had used. Guys like us, we take care of the sheep. We protect them and make sure they live quiet, safe lives.

“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” I said. “Vogel’s people have already killed one person, and I honestly don’t think they’ll hesitate to kill another one if they decide they need to.”

She was silent for a few seconds. “And you think they’re following me?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll bet they’ve set up tripwires out there. Certain people, if you go and visit them, talk to them, a wire gets tripped, a bell goes off somewhere, and the Centurions go into action.”

“It doesn’t sound like you to admit defeat.”

“I’m not. I’m not giving up.” I hesitated, and then said it: “I’m talking about you. I can take care of myself.”

“About me.”

“Right.”

“Is this — Heller, is this because of last night?”

“Of course not. It’s because you’ve been at the center of this thing since the beginning, which makes it dangerous for you if you stick your head up.” But was it, at least in part, about last night? I couldn’t ignore what I felt for her. That had to factor in. Would I be as protective of her if we hadn’t been intimate? I didn’t know. Maybe not.

But I knew what I knew, and I knew that Vogel’s people were dangerous and probably knew no limits, and that she was a soft target.

“Nick, I’ve been threatened before. But in the end, you don’t go after a journalist. You don’t kill a reporter. That just doesn’t happen.”

I happened to know for a fact that she was wrong. I knew of several journalists who were killed investigating big financial scandals. I hesitated, considered whether to say anything, and finally said, “It does happen, Mandy. It has happened, and it could happen. Don’t be foolish.”

“Jesus, Heller. Now you’re trying to scare me off?”

I was afraid she’d take it this way. Telling her about a genuine threat to her life was making her even more defiant.

“Let me pick you up. You can do whatever work you want to do here.”

“No.”

“All right, look. If you really insist on interviewing people, at least let me go with you.”

“Are you serious? Like I need a bodyguard?”

“Would my presence be that odious to you?”

She laughed.

I said, “Think of it as teaming up.”

“No, you know how I think of it? You want to chaperone me everywhere like I’m some Saudi woman, that’s what it is. It’s ridiculous. And I don’t want any part of that.”

“At the very least will you agree to work over here?”

“Yes. I’ll do that for you.”

“Great, let me pick you up.”

“No need. I’ll be over there soon. When I’m ready.”

“Okay,” I said, because I knew it wouldn’t do any good to push it further. No sense in being overbearing. “I’ll see you over here.”

Looking back on that day, it pains me to admit that I should have been more insistent, more overbearing, refused to take no for an answer.

Unfortunately, I didn’t.